Pet Blogger Challenge 2017

Yes, it’s time for the Pet Blogger Challenge. And yes li’l puppies you will be a part of our goals for 2017!

The New Year means one thing…time for the Pet Blogger Challenge 2017!

Whether you’re a new pet blogger or you’ve been around the pet blogging block the Pet Blogger Challenge is a great way to learn from your fellow bloggers, share your knowledge, and build great new relationships.

1. When did you start your blog and, for anyone who is just seeing it for first time, please provide a description of your site. Would you say your blog focuses more on sharing stories with your readers, or providing a resource for your audience?

I launched PuppyInTraining.com August 1st, 2007 to follow the journey of my first guide dog puppy in training, Stetson (funny thing is my first post was about adopting my first puppy, Linus).

Nearly 10 years later my story remains the same: I share my experiences raising and training service dog puppies in training.

Over the years this blog has become more of a resource and I’m answering hundreds of questions every week (I wish that translated into more blog posts).

This year I plan to get back to more storytelling similar to what we did with Dublin back in 2012 with Puppy In Training TV.

2. What was your proudest blogging moment of 2016?

Getting the chance to bring Stetson to BlogPaws 2016.

Stetson was the reason why I started this blog, but since he was career changed from guide dog to pet he’s largely been in the background of the blog.

The good news is all I have to do is send this link to people when they ask me this question.

The better news is these two blog posts average about 300 visitors a day which means I’m providing an answer for thousands of visitors every month.

4. Year after year, one goal that we all seem to share is that we want to reach more people. What one tool did you use or action did you take this year that had the most impact on increasing traffic to your blog?

About Colby

Colby Morita has raised guide and service dog puppies for Guide Dogs of America and Canine Support Teams. He's been writing to the PuppyInTraining.com blog and sharing his puppy training tips from his experiences as a guide dog puppy raiser since 2007.

Comments

Wow! It sounds like Pinterest has really been amazing for you. I need to work harder on using Pinterest. Congrats on getting over 18k per month on just that one pin! That is truly amazing. It sounds like your dog is a fun one to live with too. My cats sleep in bed with me, but their kicks are no where near as brutal as that. The do bite toes, though! LOL As far as the mailing list, the biggest things for me to have added joining the list as an entry option in giveaways and use the annoying pop up message in the corner of the screen. As much as I am not a fan of pop ups, I get a lot more mailing list sign ups as a result. I have also heard that offering some kind of freebie, such as a How-to guide in .pdf format, helps draw people into the newsletter too.

Those are some great tips! Thank you! Archer likes to lick toes too. As a service dog in training he’s not allowed on the bed, but he’ll lift the covers and poke us with his nose and nibble on our toes. Happy New year!

I was glad to see you at BlogPaws this past year. Having the “answer questions” thing click was huge for me. I, too, spent a lot of time answering the same question over and over again. If I get a question several times, I write a blog post about it now. That way I can answer them quickly, thoroughly, and get traffic back to my blog. It’s a win-win 🙂 Good luck in 2017!